We're in Beta! Help us test our site by sending any bugs or feedback to us by clicking the Give Feedback button. Thanks!

Okay, now these geniuses at MIT are starting to scare me.  They’ve figured out how to increase the charging speed of batteries by 36 times: and this time there are no bacteria involved, the Friends of Bacteria Association will be please to note.  The science is intricate, but basically by making nano grooves in batteries’ surfaces, the ions travel much faster, putting the possibility of electric cars’ acceleration matching petrol engines in the near future, and thereby attracting all those speed demons who won’t touch electric cars at the moment.  My resistance to viewing electric cars as the answer to our woes continues, however, as the power still has to come from somewhere: while the recharging technology could be integrated into the existing battery infrastructure in two years, home rechargers for electric cars would have to be redesigned to handle the rapid transfer of energy. “For cars, the speed that they can recharge at home will be limited not by the battery but by how much power can be made available to homeowners through the [electric] grid,” said Byoungwoo Kang, an MIT doctoral candidate working under engineering professor Gerbrand Ceder.  But it’s still no good having electric cars if everyone drives alone!  I read today in The Lazy Girl’s Guide to Green Living that there are 10 million empty seats every day, and if everyone took just one passenger (or2.37 passengers, but who’s counting?), congestion would be reduced by a third: more than the sum of the parts, methinks!

As anyone who read the blog on electric cars below will know, I’m skeptical of just changing the symptom without addressing the cause.  The big problem with electric cars (as with computers, phones, and even wind and wave power) is that batteries, to date, are uneconomical in terms of the energy that is lost in storage.  A team at Boston’s MIT university have come up with a solution that is part terrifying and part exciting.  These braniacs have genetically engineered a virus that builds rechargeable lithium-ion batteries in the form of a plastic film. 

Whatsmore, these nanocreatures were created using green processes: the researchers bred the viruses to self-assemble nanoscale battery films by creating billions of random variations, then using the survival-of-the-fittest principle to select those that best performed desired tasks. (One man’s breeding is another man’s genetic engineering…!) And the batteries can be constructed in an environmentally-friendly manner, avoiding toxic solvents and energy-intensive procedures:  “Because the viruses are living organisms, we had to use only water-based solvents, no high pressures and no high temperatures,” says Angela Belcher, the study coauthor.

The viruses were selected from common bacteriophages, which infect bacteria but are harmless to humans. To the Buddhists in the house who say “But what about the bacteria?  Aren’t they living creatures too?”  I can only answer – if we keep using the old batteries there won’t be any bacteria left to care…!

In demonstrations, batteries made using the micro-contact printing method were able to be recharged hundreds of times with no detectable drop in performance – now that truly is incredible. We still have the problem of how the charge will be created, but this is extremely interesting news for greeniacs everywhere who can overlook the Frankenstein element of living creatures creating things – but wait!  Isn’t that what farming is all about?  In this case, the farm is just nano size – not as picturesque, but then global warming isn’t too pretty either…

Eventually, they plan to commercialize the printable battery films. Last week, MIT President Susan Hockfield demonstrated the prototype to U.S. President Barack Obama.  This wasn’t just a courtesy: funding for the research was provided by the U.S. Army Research Office Institute and the U.S. National Science Foundation.  Here’s hoping Obama will use it for the right purposes….